The Wooden Walls of Thermopylae (22 page)

“This won’t be like Marathon; listen, Mandrocles. This time he doesn’t need ships to march his army over to Greece. While we’ve been fighting ourselves, he’s fought and won a war with the ocean.”

My expression must have told him I’d no idea what he was talking about. He explained.

“He’s bridged the Hellespont. He’s built a raft of boats across the sea: a bridge wide enough for three chariots to ride side by side. He’s turned the sea into land and he’s going to march the biggest army the world’s ever seen across it. Back at Marathon we faced an expeditionary force sent to punish us. This is an invasion, this time he intends to wipe us out. While his fleet blockades us, his army will march across Greece through the Hot Gates to wipe us, and anyone stupid enough to stand with us, from the face of the earth.”

The owl hooted again, a message from the underworld.

“Every spot we’ve set foot on today, Mandrocles, will be destroyed, every building pulled down, everything that can
burn will burn. My plays on Prometheus, the House Of Atreus and all the others will never be written. Democracy will cease to exist.”

I’d never seen him like this, even when drunk. Today he’d been drinking but wasn’t drunk; he was lucid. Lucid and terrifying. I tried to encourage him.

“Go to Themistocles; talk to him, he’ll have anticipated this, he’ll have a plan.”

“Well there’s a slight problem with that, Mandrocles.”

I waited for it, waited for the lightning strike.

“No one knows where he is. He’s left the city.”

The owl broke cover and swept into the night searching for prey.

By the next day it was all round the city, embellished by a lavish covering of rumour. The Gods were punishing us by allowing the Persians to walk on water and Themistocles was at the court of the Great King, advising his generals. Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it, but then you have the advantage of hindsight, don’t you, reader? Back then, even if you were smart enough to allow for exaggeration it was still terrifying.

The Alkmaionid view propagated by their whisperers was that Themistocles had purged the true leadership of the city so that the Persians could walk in unopposed and install Themistocles as tyrant.

In a sense this was true. Without Themistocles there was no leader. Nothing put this in sharper relief than the efforts of Nicodemus and his other democratic supporters to reassure the city. Without Themistocles they were nothing and their efforts were pitiful and made matters worse. Fear and suspicion grew, neighbour feared neighbour and those with enough money or interests elsewhere made plans to leave Athens.

So it was a relief when the Athene Nike was back in the water and we could resume our training of potential oarsmen. Now, when the city has such a large standing fleet spread across the empire and to row as a free man in the
fleet is a mark of pride and citizenship, there’s a large pool of skilled rowers in reserve. Back then it was very different. And it wasn’t just the lack of bodies: it was the class of men.

Throughout our history it had been the hoplite class that fought our wars. Local wars in the main, with set times of year for fighting, a pretty good understanding of the rules and conventions on both sides and limited engagements with few casualties. The hoplites were landowning citizens who would turn out when required but not for too long and never during harvest.

Marathon changed all that; now we faced total war, the kind not seen since the fight at Troy. A war which destroyed both the Greeks and the Trojans. Like the Greek heroes of old we would go to war in ships, but unlike them we’d also fight from them. Fight against the largest and most experienced navy the world has ever seen.

We lacked men with experience and this was exacerbated by the fact that most of the men crewing the triremes came from a class of men previously not trusted to fight. Our situation was desperate. The experienced rowers were spread throughout the fleet to train the new men so no ship performed well: a fact that particularly rankled with the perfectionist Ariston.

“Thank the Gods Theodorus isn’t here to see these donkeys fucking up the strokes. Lucky for them, too.”

He broke off to curse Praxiteles, a clumsy landsman who had the added misfortune to be rowing from the Thranitai benches in the outrigger and so was particularly visible.

“Why don’t you grab a lump of bronze and jump over the fucking side; do us all a favour. You’re meant to be stroking the water, not trying to spoon it up so we can all fucking drink it.”

He shouted to the most experienced of the Thranitai on board.

“Sophilos: show him one more time how it’s done and if he still can’t, pitch him overboard. The Gods help us, what are we meant to do with the likes of these?”

It didn’t help that we were soaked most of the time by the spray occasioned by the clumsy splashing of the oars. But that wasn’t the worst part: triremes are delicately balanced fighting ships and unless handled steadily, highly unstable. We’d already heard of two that had overturned during training exercises. Not quite the way the preparation for war is told in the heroic stories, is it?

But for me it wasn’t so bad: I was one of the few men regarded as an experienced sea fighter and men respected me. Privately I’d begun to entertain the idea that one day, if I wasn’t killed first, I might become a trierarch. We all need to dream, and me especially, because reality was grindingly harsh. Almost everyone I loved I’d lost. The light began to fail, Ariston leaned on the joint tillers and we turned for port.

Aeschylus was waiting for me on the dockside. He didn’t look like a man bringing good news.

“Mandrocles, I think it’s time you paid a visit on your young master.”

He turned and walked away; it was clear he wasn’t going to speak further in a place where it was so easy to be overheard. I followed him towards his dead brother’s bar above the port. The bar was empty but there was the sound of someone moving about in the upper chambers. He poured some wine straight from the pot into two clay cups and handed me one. I was glad of the drink; my skin prickled with the salt from sea spray and my mouth was dry and stale. I only had time for a quick gulp.

“Stay here tonight: tomorrow you go to see Cimon at Brauron.”

I suppose it’s some weakness that the Gods placed into my soul but there are people in my life who, when they
command, I obey. It seemed that Aeschylus had joined that select group: I didn’t question him. I was about to ask him if he had news of Lyra but it seemed his mind was running along a similar track.

“I’m trying a play about war, the testing ground of men, yet every time I write the scroll fills with women. Strange, don’t you think, when everything in our lives is filled with the preparation for killing?”

“Not too strange, I’ve been thinking about Lyra.”

“I’m not thinking about anyone we know, about individual women, Mandrocles. I’m thinking about how their feelings penetrate the city and affect us.”

He’d lost me; I said nothing, just drank my wine and listened.

“They play no part in the affairs of the polis, in the affairs of men, in the decisions of life and death or war and peace. Respectable, they cover their faces, keep to the women’s quarters or if not respectable they service us.”

I didn’t know where this was going but I clearly wasn’t going to find out anything about Lyra.

“Yet they haunt my plays. They stare into them from the margins. Then when I least expect it they are centre of the stage. They assume a place denied them in real life: In front of the chorus they make things happen, change the action. Change it in a way I’d not imagined, never mind intended.”

I poured myself another cup, this wouldn’t be over quickly: he’d caught me like this before, used me like a potential audience. Looking back I think I was lucky to have listened to the inner daemon of the greatest poet ever born.

“I write of how the Gods play with us, I write of fate and men. How we believe we think and act for ourselves, control our own destinies but it’s all a cruel joke. Yet now, when I grapple with the return of Agamemnon from Troy, it’s not
he or Orestes the words drag me towards.”

He took a drink, stared into the rafters: for the moment I didn’t exist, he’d gone towards the words the God gave him.

“It’s not the men or their actions the words drag me to: it’s the murderess Clytemnestra, possessed Electra, cursed and helpless Cassandra. Even Our Goddess the great Lady Athena decides the outcome. The words teem with women. The men are lacking all conviction and are directionless, driven by madness. The women are unnatural, filled with a passionate intensity and their strange voices shred the soul.”

He threw his cup across the room; it shattered on the far wall and the dregs and lees trickled down the new plasterwork, leaving a dark stain. This was a trick I’d seen before, there was no point reacting: we sat in silence for a while then he got up and fetched a fresh cup from the counter, filled it, topped up mine and picked up where he’d left off.

“Doesn’t matter what I’m driven to write about, they’re there: If I choose Hector, Andromache worms her way inside, if I write about Thebes there’s Antigone. Even in my work on Prometheus, which as you know I’ve been told to keep for safer times, my speaking voice the chorus are women. I can’t silence their voices; Why? Phrynichus doesn’t have this problem, neither does anyone else.”

I wish he were still alive now, I’d be able to tell him that Pericles’s pet poet Sophocles and, it is rumoured, the schoolboy Euripides share the same problem. But back then Sophocles hadn’t started writing and Euripides’s parents hadn’t even met, so all I could find to say was,

“Write about war and courage in the face of the Gods.”

It was this innocent statement that led him to the strangest of his musings.

“You think that’s the only form of courage, Mandrocles?”

He didn’t want an answer; at least, he didn’t wait for one.

“What about Andromache watching Hector from the walls of Troy, seeing her son killed yet surviving slavery to end in dignity?”

I knew the answer to this one.

“She had no choice, that’s not courage, all she did was endure.”

“What about a woman prepared to sell herself to protect her family honour?”

I knew he meant Elpinice: this hurt and stung but before I could tell him he said something; something which at the time I didn’t understand. Something so close to me and my life. Something I was ignorant of, that I didn’t even suspect.

“What if a woman keeps a secret which destroys her life because she doesn’t want to compromise her man?”

I didn’t know what he was talking about, and anyway I’d become bored with the topic. I didn’t reply, just yawned. We finished our wine and began to talk about my trip to visit Cimon at Brauron. I knew there was more to it than just that, but whatever it was, he wasn’t going to tell me. Whatever the purpose I was ready for a change.

By now the lamps were lit and it was dark. A group of men with blistered hands and wind burnt faces were sharing a chou of wine after a hard day learning to work their oars. I knew them, or rather, they recognised me and called me over to drink with them. When they left I helped Aeschylus close up the bar before we went to bed. As we went up to our pallets he said, as if our earlier talk hadn’t finished,

“Compare the voice of the women in my plays to the voice of women in the city.”

I replied,

“They have no voice in the affairs of the city.”

“Yes, they do, but we don’t hear it.”

“How would you know?”

“Because it’s there. I write about it because it’s there.”

The next day I was up early and rode out of the Piraeus before the sun had reared its head from below the waters. Passing through the mass of shacks that now formed a substantial shanty town beyond the gates, I realised that like ten years earlier, refugees fleeing from the might of the Persian Empire were flocking towards Athens for safety.

The city was growing beyond its capacity. The same applied to the fields beyond the city limits and the mountain foothills: every spare plot that was capable of growing anything was under some type of cultivation.

Our city was changing rapidly; soon, the nucleus of the original sacred precinct with its temples and dwellings would be overwhelmed by a tent city of the dispossessed, destroying that which they desired. The day was pleasantly warm: summer was on the breeze and once into the routine of the ride I settled into that beatific state of trance that such days bring with them.

Once over the mountain pass, that almost ten years earlier I’d marched across to Marathon to fight for freedom, I took a slight diversion through the grove of Heracles to the great mound: the mound on the beach which covered our dead.

I stood for a moment in its shadow looking up towards the pennants and trophies decorating its summit. Inside were the bones of some of the best men to whom Athens ever gave birth. I said a particular prayer to the goddess of victory for the brother of Aeschylus, who had bled to death on the beach during the skirmish round the Persian ships. Turned to the sea and invoked the forgiveness of the Persian boy who I needlessly killed and whose shade still haunts my dreams.

The blood-soaked salt marshes, dead lands before Marathon but now ghost-filled, lay forbidding in the dying sun. In that place of victory and death you could feel the living presence of the sly and malign God Pan.

Wandering through the groves that house his shrine,
where we camped before the battle, I felt the presence of the dead more than the living. Here in this home of the God of sudden fear, I knelt and wept for the shade of Miltiades. His story would have ended well if he’d died here at the site of his triumph. He would have lain in honour next to his friends and not had his dishonoured bones tossed out for the dogs.

Strange how emotion is deferred, how we understand and feel our lives backwards. I think I felt closer to Miltiades there in death more than I did in life. But grieving or not, I had to leave. No man can spend long alone in the solitary glades of that grim place. A creeping feel of unease gradually crept over me, growing to panic. I set off back to where the horse was tethered; walking at first before breaking into a jog then running full pelt.

Don’t laugh, reader, or, at least, if you feel so inclined try spending some time alone there yourself. See if you feel like laughing then. The horse was fretful when I found him: whatever was there, he felt it too, and as soon as I mounted he broke into a canter. Behind me I could hear the shade of the Persian boy weeping for the manhood he never knew.

Once away the horse calmed and settled to a walk and we passed the temple of Hercules and the Deme boundary and at length, there ahead of us, lay the ancient homestead of Miltiades’s ancestors: Brauron. I was relieved to have arrived but even here, safe within its precincts, I felt haunted. Not by the dead but by the living, now dead to me. For my mind was full of the memory of the night of bliss I spent with Elpinice in the olive grove beyond the estate walls.

So with nerves shredded and thoughts confused I rode through the gates to be greeted by the fierce barking of the family hunting dogs. But there was no relief to be found inside. Cimon had been hunting with his friends and afterwards drinking. He was stone drunk, barely recognising me;
able only to slur out an uncertain greeting. So the rumours were true. But that was nothing to what came next.

A woman emerged from the female quarters clad in a peplos and veil of mourning. The figure beneath the covering was haggard, emaciated and unsteady. Despite all that I recognised her instantly. Elpinice.

“Welcome, my brother will greet you tomorrow if his head has cleared.”